Monuments to the Soviet Army were among the visual emblems of the socialist period that, after 1989, became points of rigorous debate in all Eastern European countries. Symbolizing the perpetuity of the political order during socialist times, the monuments became problematic once the socialist states and their power began to decompose. While before they were used to celebrate the victory over fascism and the prosperity of the socialist state under the “brotherly patronage” of the Soviet Union, after 1989 they were regarded rather as symbols of foreign domination, military interference, and political subordination. The changed political atmosphere permitted viewing the Soviet Army not as conferring “liberation” and “freedom,” but rather as violating sovereignty and imposing political and cultural domination. What was once supposed to represent a “liberating mission” and “brotherly help” against fascism, capitalism, and Western imperialism was interpreted as an expression of imperial policies for exercising power and oppression. The goal of the current article is to shed light on the “brotherly help” narrative that surrounded the monuments to the Soviet Army in Bulgaria and to trace its gradual substitution with the narrative of “imperial” legacy after 1989. The article will demonstrate the logic of interpreting these monuments as signs of a “second liberation” in socialist Bulgaria and the new meanings attributed to them after the political changes of 1989.
It is important to note at the beginning that in other Eastern European countries, the interpretation of Soviet army monuments as signs of imperial rule was hardly an invention of 1989. In most countries of the region, the garment of socialist internationalism that was propagated after the war and sustained over the succeeding decades could not conceal a general revulsion (duly silenced on the official level) against Soviet political power and its symbols. The riots and uprisings of the 1950s and 1960s in East Central Europe and the protests against the Soviet military presence over the following three decades prompted the problematic standing of Soviet monuments as posts of foreign rule.^[1] This contrasted sharply to the official position, which turned Soviet monuments into the main venues for celebrating the defeat of fascism, the Red Army’s arrival in the countries of Eastern Europe, and the “happy” life after the Second World War.^[2] It is neither necessary nor possible to trace the history of Soviet Army monuments in the different countries of Eastern Europe and the logic of interpretation that followed over the years.^[3] Still, several points are worth raising before looking at the peculiarity of the Bulgarian case, in which the elaboration of the “brotherly help” narrative followed different lines, and subversive interpretations of these monuments were practically absent until 1989.
The majority of the monuments to the Soviet Army in Eastern Europe were created immediately after the war and until the end of the 1950s numbered in hundreds.^[4] Raised before any other permanent symbols of the new political order, they were actually (in A. Aman’s words) victory monuments in the lands of the conquered.^[5] Primarily intended to honor the fallen in the war, they were swiftly utilized to glorify the Soviet Union as a liberator and protector. Monuments to the Red Army were claimed as conveying the supreme goals that the Soviet Union served and were thought to be a reflection of the all-defeating ideology of the Soviet state and its power. They asserted the historic fate of the Soviet Union “as a protector of the great deed of the October Revolution, as a savior of mankind and human civilization and as a guardian of world peace.”^[6] The mid-1950s, however, witnessed a gradual exhaustion of the commemorative attention to the war dead and a more overt understanding of what meanings these monuments also conveyed. Monuments to the war and the Soviet Army continued to be unveiled over the following several decades, but only occasionally; a monumental tradition was not established in any East European country except Bulgaria.^[7] Unlike most other East European countries, in Bulgaria large memorial complexes to Soviet soldiers were constructed up until the mid-1980s with almost the same intensity and attention as in the 1950s. The focus of special attention over the entire socialist period, they occupied the most prominent sites of city topographies and (together with the abounding monuments to partisan and antifascist resistance) were the core of political ceremonies for about four decades.

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Fig. 1. Monument in Sofia to the medical officers perished in the Russian-Turkish War (photo: N. Vukov, 2004).

The reasons for this continuous attention are not difficult to find. Bulgaria was the only country in which the idiom of “liberation” by the Soviet Army found firm ground both in previous historical experience and in the monumental discourse prior to 1945. The Soviet Army’s arrival in Bulgaria in September 1944 was termed in Bulgarian historiography as following a pattern of liberation that had been pursued by Russian troops in the war against the Ottoman Empire in 1877-1878. The latter brought the liberation of Bulgaria and confirmed the expectation that the Russian brothers would not leave the Bulgarian people unaided against oppression. The Russian-Turkish War provided a powerful memory resource for the Bulgarian people and at least until the end of the First World War, the monuments to dead Russian soldiers raised at places of battle, field military hospitals, and town centers were the primary examples of monumental art in Bulgaria.^[8] Expressions of the gratitude of the Bulgarian people to their liberators, the monuments united local communities, regional authorities, and state institutions to mark with memorial signs (tomb monuments, pyramids, cemeteries, churches, etc.) the sites of battles and death of Russian soldiers (see fig. 1). Entire ensembles of monuments were created for tracing the path of victory in the course of the Russian-Turkish War. Especially significant commemorative forms were the temple monuments (near Kazanlak, Yambol, Shipka, and Sofia – see fig. 2) and temple-mausoleums (in Pleven, Pordim, and Razgrad) built in the first quarter of the twentieth century. The most significant of these commemorative activities in the interwar period was the huge monument ossuary of “Shipka” (initiated in the beginning of the twentieth century and completed only in 1934), which preserved the mortuary remains of Russian soldiers fallen in the battle.

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Fig. 2. The “Alexander Nevski” Church in Sofia (photo: N. Vukov, 2004).

In all these various examples, commemorative attention fell upon the sacrifice of thousands of ordinary Russian soldiers and on an “unbreakable friendship that overcame the hard trials of history.”^[9] With the exception of the monument to the Tsar Liberator in Sofia (1907, see fig. 3), the explicit associations to the Russian Empire in these monuments were limited to reminders of the Russian generals’ strategic skills and the invincibility of the Russian sword. Although attempts to interpret the war as a product of the Russian Empire’s geopolitical ambitions were voiced by some Russophobic political parties and groups at the turn of the nineteenth century, the commemoration of the Russo-Turkish War remained unambiguous and the discourse of gratitude to the liberators remained unchanged. The Russia of the days of the Russo-Turkish War no longer existed and diplomatic relations between the two states were frequently tense, but the notion of historical friendship remained and the memory of the Russian-Turkish War had a firm place in state ceremonies. This was further facilitated by the fact that Russian-Turkish War monuments were part of the national symbology of the Bulgarian nation-state and until the 1940s were the only ones that represented and manifested victory.^[10] The first significant attempts to offer a novel understanding of this war occurred only with the establishment of the Soviet Union and the new paths of historical interpretation that it gave rise to in the interwar period. While official appreciation of the Russian-Turkish War required a more careful approach and sanctioning because of unwarranted associations with the Soviet state, on a popular level the attempts of socialist organizations to appropriate the Russian-Bulgarian brotherhood for propaganda activities was explicit.^[11]

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Fig. 3. The monument to the Tzar-Liberator in Sofia (photo: N. Vukov, 2004).

In the socialist period, the monuments to the Russian-Turkish War received renewed attention and became the focal points of festive celebrations.^[12] Special programs were developed for the monuments in the towns of the largest battles and many new monuments, museums, and memorial sites were established. In Pleven and Pordim, memorial parks dedicated to General Lavrov were opened, and the special park to the Russian-Turkish War in Svishtov was expanded. In Stara Zagora, on a historic hill near the town, the monument “Samarsko zname”^[13] was built, and the “Shipka” monument was declared a national park-museum. The history of the Russian-Turkish War and the monuments dedicated to it frequently attracted the attention of the media and new materials about the war dead were regularly published.^[14] In 1978, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the liberation of Bulgaria, one of the largest monuments dedicated to the Russian-Turkish War – the “Panorama” in Pleven – was constructed. Raised on one of the hills where the battles for Pleven took place, the Panorama turned into a central locus for the celebration of National Liberation Day, for patriotic educational activities, and for military and political rituals. Though not following closely the manner of Soviet army monuments, the monuments to the Russian-Turkish War built in the socialist era were subsumed in the monumental culture of the period and addressed nineteenth-century historical experience through the post-1945 retroactive pattern. In visual forms and aesthetic terms, the continuities between the “first” and “second” liberation might not necessarily show explicit connections with the Soviet types. The monuments to the Russian-Turkish War built in the socialist period often drew upon the artistic framework of nineteenth-century forms and it was mainly the interpretative context around them that linked them to socialist monumental aesthetics and made them function as parts of the socialist state’s visual discourse.
The memory of the Russian-Turkish War was a firm launching point for the discourse of friendship with the Soviet Union promulgated during the socialist period; to include the commemoration of Russian soldiers within this discourse was not a difficult task. For decades, the Bulgarian population perceived these monuments as relics and maintained them with care and love.^[15] This memory reserve was actively utilized after the Second World War in Bulgaria, and to the numerous monuments to Bulgarian-Russian brotherhood were added many more dedicated to the “Bulgarian-Russian and Bulgarian-Soviet friendship.”^[16] The peak of this converging interpretation was the 100th anniversary of the liberation in 1978, when special memorial compositions expressed gratitude to the Russian and Soviet soldiers who died for Bulgaria’s freedom.^[17] As long as the idea of brotherly help from across the Danube had deep historical roots and strong symbolic power for Bulgarians, it did not require much effort to see the second crossing of the Danube as a “second liberation” predestined and prefigured by the first. Present already before the victory of socialist ideology in Bulgaria and guiding the activities of the Bulgarian socialists throughout the entire interwar period, it was a resource of the social and political imagination that found its “logical realization” in the establishment of the socialist order in 1944. The exploits of Russian soldiers were claimed in the socialist period as not only requiring proper commemoration and respect, but also obliging Bulgarians to follow the path that the liberators’ descendents, the Soviet people, have drawn for the inevitable progressive development of all mankind.
The commemoration of the Red Army thus found a well-established interpretative pattern and a rich tradition of monumental expression to the Soviet soldiers’ predecessors. Monuments to the Soviet Army were customarily built in proximity to monuments of the Russian-Turkish War and were explicitly dedicated to “those to whom we owe our freedom twice.” The notion of a “twofold liberation”^[18] conditioned not only Bulgaria’s affiliation as the Soviet Union’s most faithful adherent in the socialist bloc, but also determined the set of meanings around these monuments in Bulgaria, distinguishing them from those raised in the other Eastern European countries. The historical roots of the friendship between the two brotherly peoples conferred a stable legitimization of the Soviet army monuments in socialist Bulgaria and justified the claims of “internationalism” and “liberating mission” with historical projections far back into the past. It was only after 1989 when, after the fall of the socialist regime and the dissolution of the socialist bloc, this notion underwent a general reevaluation and the view that these monuments were emblems of occupation and imperial ambitions was overtly voiced. But before shedding light on this interpretative shift, a closer look at the elaboration of the “brotherly help” narrative in socialist times is in order.

MONUMENTS TO THE SOVIET ARMY IN SOCIALIST BULGARIA

Already before the end of the Second World War, a committee for eternalizing the memory of Soviet soldiers in Bulgaria was established.^[19] Its first goal was to find the graves of all Soviet soldiers who died in Bulgarian lands and to arrange the remains in specially prepared graveyards and ossuaries (see fig. 4), as well as to locate the graves of other soldiers from the allied coalition (American, English, Canadian, etc.). Following the tasks of eternalizing the memory of the Red Army soldiers on 20 April 1945, the committee published a special regulation for raising monuments in their honor.^[20] On 8 January 1945 near Vidin, where 151 Soviet soldiers who fell in the fight against fascist divisions in Yugoslavia were buried, a memorial and a Soviet war cemetery were unveiled.^[21] Dedicated to those who died against the Hitlerists near Negotin and Vrushka chuka, this cemetery was probably the first Soviet military cemetery in Europe outside of the USSR and the largest Soviet military cemetery in Bulgaria.^[22] Two days after the creation of the cemetery, a monument to the fallen Red Army soldiers was sanctified.^[23] Military cemeteries of Red Army soldiers were created in other towns in Bulgaria, such as Bregovo, Russe, and Plovdiv, and in all of them monuments were raised to signify the presence and the glory of the dead.

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Fig. 4. The monument to Alexander II near the monument to the Soviet army in Plovdiv (photo: N. Vukov, 2003).

Having its first examples in the military cemeteries to the fallen in the war, the construction of monuments to the Soviet army was an expected consequence of the will to eternalize their memory and to bring it to the foregrounds of public commemoration. Already the first attempts at this outlined two major characteristics that were to be followed over the years: emphasized references to the Russian-Turkish War of 1877-1878, and the ossuary element that determined death’s core role in the symbolic legitimization of these monuments. One of the first monument ossuaries to the Soviet soldiers, in Shumen, preserved the bones from about 50 graves of Soviet soldiers who died in the region. Unveiled in a solemn ceremony in 1949, it was announced as a monument of the “double liberation” and the years 1877-1944 were inscribed on it.^[24] While the central figure was a soldier with a flag and a bomb in his hands, a multi-figured relief depicted the welcoming of the army-liberator. On 20 December 1950, a ceremony unveiling the monument to the Soviet Army in Russe was held. Already in April 1948, the officers and the soldiers of the 5th Danube Division had collected the remains of all Soviet soldiers who were buried in different places in North-Central Bulgaria and placed them in a mound upon which the monument was later raised (see fig. 5).^[25] The statue was of a Soviet soldier with a flag in his hand, and on the back side of the pedestal were the famous words of G. Dimitrov: “for the Bulgarian people, the friendship with the Soviet Union is of such vital necessity as are the sun and the air for every living creature.”^[26]

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Fig. 5. The Soviet military cemetery in Russe (photo: N. Vukov, 2003).

Apart from these initial examples, in the first years after 1944 small monuments to fallen Soviet soldiers were built in many towns and villages and special monuments-ossuaries were created in Plovdiv, Sofia, and Nova Zagora.^[27] On 23 February 1954, on the Day of the Soviet Army and Navy, the official unveiling of the monument-ossuary in Sofia was held, dedicated to the fallen Soviet soldiers in the Fatherland War.^[28] An ossuary was built behind the monument and the names of 158 Soviet soldiers were inscribed on its commemorative wall. Constructed largely as a grave marker, the monument reminded its viewers of the soldiers’ self-sacrifice “in the name of freedom and the happy life of future generations.”^[29] The end of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s marked a wave of building victory monuments to the Soviet Army in a series of towns – Tolbuhin (Dobrich), Sliven, Nova Zagora, Stara Zagora, and Yambol.^[30] The largest monument of this type was built in the capital (see fig. 6) and it represented a large memorial complex with alleys and ossuaries, brass wreaths, and flowerbeds. The central sculpture composition consisted of Soviet and Bulgarian fighters and was complemented with reliefs depicting scenes of the Second World War and of the Soviet Union’s brotherly support after the war. Several sculpture compositions depicted the struggle in the war and the happy socialist life. The monument’s official unveiling took place on the 10th anniversary of the Socialist revolution in Bulgaria (9 September 1954) in the presence of leading Party activists and a delegation from the Soviet Union, including the Marshall of the USSR, Sergei Biriuzov.^[31]

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Fig. 6. The monument to the Soviet army in Russe (photo: N. Vukov, 2003).

The years of 1954-55 were marked with several other monuments to the Soviet Army in Burgas, Varna, and Pleven. The one in Burgas was soberly unveiled on 9 May 1954 and the one in Stalin (Varna) – on 6 November 1954, on the occasion of the 37th anniversary of the October Revolution.^[32] The Monument to the Soviet Army in Pleven was unveiled officially on 9 May 1955 on the 10th anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany. In line with the already established iconographic fashion, it represented a Soviet soldier upon a granite column-pedestal and announcing victory and freedom.^[33] Together with the central place it occupied in the town, its location was symbolically emphasized by the mausoleum of Russian and Romanian soldiers who perished in 1877-78, which stood in its background in the “Square of Freedom.” Similar symbolic meanings, expressed in temporal proximity, were sought in the monument of the Soviet army in Plovdiv, which, built closely to the old Russian monument, was claimed as “a symbol of those to whom we owe our freedom twice and with whom shoulder to shoulder we are building the present.”^[34] Unveiled in November 1957, it represented a complex ensemble of stairs and architectural elements, leading to a grand statue of an armed Soviet soldier.^[35] The granite pedestal preserved a small mausoleum – an urn with the remains of Soviet soldiers, headed by the inscription “Glory to the Soviet army-liberator.” While the bas-relief on the pedestal’s southern side depicted the Red Army’s war exploits, the northern one showed the happy welcoming of the Soviet soldiers in Bulgaria.
In the 1960s and 1970s, enhanced attention was given to commemorating, with monuments and memorial signs, the death of individual Soviet soldiers (in Michurin, Primorsko, Bardarski Geran, Veselinovo, etc.)^[36] and to find previously undiscovered places related to the Soviet Army.^[37] This did not preclude the building of grand victory monuments over the entire period until the mid-1980s, their meaning inalterably focusing on the military, the “second liberation,” and its festive celebration.^[38] In the 1960s, monuments dedicated to the peaceful days of the Bulgarian and Soviet soldiers appeared^[39] and a new tendency – of dissolving the meanings of the Soviet army monuments into ones dedicated to Bulgarian-Soviet friendship – could be seen. Notably, in most of these monuments the legitimating references to the Russian-Turkish War persisted, revealing yet again the intention to narrate the Russian-Turkish War as “preceding” and “prefiguring” the post-war “liberation.” At the end of the 1960s, a project for building a huge monument to the Soviet Army near Varna was developed and after a decade of construction it was solemnly unveiled in 1978.^[40] This park-monument “to the Soviet army and the Bulgarian-Soviet friendship” was shaped in the form of a huge stone seagull, on whose wings (in an overt reminder to the liberation from the Ottoman dominion) were depicted three soldiers welcomed by Bulgarians as liberators and guests. The choice of the site was not accidental: as emphasized in the media, the monument was built on a site that had once been the defense lines of the Russian troops in 1878.^[41]
The presence of only one monument to the Soviet Army in some towns was often considered not enough and thus additional ones were built. As a phenomenon of the late 1970s and 1980s, it did not rely that much on the presence of deadly remains or on the monument-ossuary as an architectural type, but focused rather on the motifs of the welcoming of the Soviet soldiers and of the Bulgarian-Soviet friendship. In this way, it explicitly used the victory monument type, and drew inspiration from the deep historical roots of friendship and the constructed-with-enhanced-vigor continuity between the Russian-Turkish War and the Fatherland War. In 1978 a decision was made to create a new monument to the Soviet Army in Tolbuhin. The projects for the monument, named “Welcoming the Soviet army to the Bulgarian lands,” were to be submitted by the end of June 1979. As the official Party newspaper noted, its composition “ought to be grandiose.” The road to Balchik, where a monument to General Zimmermann, one of the leaders of the Russian army in 1977-78, was located, was chosen as the site for the new monument.^[42]
The development of Soviet army monuments into monuments to Bulgarian-Soviet friendship was emphasized especially in the last years of the regime, when the celebratory spirit and the festivities organized around monuments explicitly predominated. In 1987 in Byala Slatina, near where a monument to dead Soviet pilots had been built in 1968, the “Park of Bulgarian-Soviet Friendship” was founded. The solemn unveiling of the monument took place on the occasion of the forthcoming 70th anniversary of the October revolution, with more than 2,000 people present. The program included sports and tourist demonstrations by the Bulgarian Tourist Union, the announcement of the opening of a fair, the deposition of wreaths and flowers before the monument on behalf of veterans and members of youth and Komsomol organizations, and a musical program with Bulgarian and Soviet songs.^[43] In 1987, on the eve of the 70th anniversary of the Great October Revolution, a monument to Bulgarian-Soviet Friendship was unveiled in the Bakadjitsite park near Yambol.^[44] This “monument-symbol to Bulgarian-Soviet friendship” represented a complex architectural ensemble of stairs more than one kilometer long, which led to stone figures of unfolded banners and four sculptural figures, representing a Russian and a Bulgarian soldier, a mother with a child, a cosmonaut and above them all – the goddess of victory, Nike.^[45]
Drawing abundantly from the symbolic potential that the Russian monuments provided to Bulgarian monumental art,^[46] the monuments to the Soviet Army (and their variations in the monuments to Bulgarian-Soviet friendship) held a key position in the monumental discourse in socialist Bulgaria. They provided the framework for political celebrations during the period and instigated the most important tendencies of monumental art and political commemoration in the country. With respect to their topics and artistic features, monuments to the Soviet Army introduced not only a military theme (one celebrating the victorious liberation), but also that of international solidarity, and (from late 1960s) of the “peaceful and harmonious” life under socialism. All these varying monumental practices witnessed to the ability of the ideology to follow commemorative forms that reaffirmed the already established interpretative framework and to remain persistent in sticking to the narrative of the “twofold liberation.” Encoding political domination into the notion of “brotherly help” and “liberation,” it used the latter as a major legitimating pillar of the established order. The historical depth of the friendship between the two peoples and the demonstrated gratitude to the country’s liberators appeared thus convenient means to achieve the regime’s glorification and to propagate its eternal stability. It was namely this point – the joint legitimization between the two “liberating missions” – that brought substantial differences in the attitudes to Soviet army monuments in the other East European countries and that explains the lack of alternative interpretations in Bulgaria before 1989.

MONUMENTS TO THE SOVIET ARMY AFTER 1989

The political changes of 1989 brought about a substantial transformation in the notions of historical memory and its representations, and public monuments were primary objects in these symbolic shifts. The call to reevaluate historical figures and events had a direct impact on monumental discourse after 1989 and left hardly any of the monumental types of the socialist epoch untouched. Among the multitude of monuments created in socialist Bulgaria (to socialist leaders and special figures of socialist ideology, to the partisan and antifascist movement, to social rebels and to national heroes shaped along ideological lines, etc.), the ones to the Soviet Army were the focus of the most ardent debates. Their major meanings – as construed and propagated in socialist times – swiftly corroded, acquiring different or even opposite interpretations. The meetings to decide the fate of such monuments, the skirmishes between different political groups, and the inclusion of various cultural, state, and private organizations in the debates, shaped the presence of these monuments as central points in political life after the fall of the totalitarian regime. The main issue that was addressed in these meetings concerned the profile of the Soviet Army and its role as an “occupier” rather than as “bringer of freedom.” What had once been thought to represent “the force and the unbreakable might of the Soviet Army,” and “the gratitude and thankfulness of the Bulgarian people to their liberators,” was interpreted as representing “adulation to the enslaver, fanaticism, and oppression.”^[47] In opposition to these claims, the underestimation of the Soviet Army’s role in the defeat of fascism was often termed as “memorial infantilism” and appeals were made for an adequate evaluation following the examples of other European countries.
The contesting interpretations of the role of the Soviet Army turned the monuments into objects over which the battle for historical memory would play out. With their enormous size and imposing structure, they were justifiably viewed as symbols of cultural colonialism. The aesthetic reasons blended with those associated with preserving “historical truth” and “national dignity,” and were yet another argument in the debates for a more appropriate design for the city centers that the monuments occupied. The signs of desecration that occurred at the sites further strengthened the calls for deconstruction and redesign. The denigrating inscriptions and graffiti, the political and commercial advertisements that populated the areas after 1989, as well as the dirt and waste that were piled up as signs of protest, were themselves a political and aesthetic position in favor of monuments’ dismantlement. The fate of these sites varied throughout the years, but they all passed through public debate concerning their possible destruction, through signs of protest and youth culture activities, and ended with a gradual adaptation in the city environments. In spite of the threat of complete destruction that was faced by all the monuments to the Soviet Army in Bulgaria, few of them encountered anything more than a partial dismantling. In the following pages, I will briefly go through some of the major examples of the Soviet army monuments in Bulgaria, attempting to emphasize the span of memory and its associations, the various options for monuments’ metamorphoses, and the reshaped notion of historical memory that these changes implied.
The victory monument to the Soviet Army in Sofia has been the focus of most ardent debates, meetings, and skirmishes since 1989. Regularly covered with graffiti and subsequently cleaned, protested against, or protected by live chains of people, it continues to stand in one of the central squares of the Bulgarian capital. In the numerous debates throughout the years, the understanding of what the monument represented has varied widely. Its interpretation spanned from being a symbol of enslavement throughout the years of socialism, a memorial sign to the war dead, an element of recent history emptied of powerful meaning, and a reminder of the “curiosities” of the socialist past. The alteration in the monument’s meaning and the inability to reach a conclusion on the limits of representation determined its fate and contributed to its problematic and continued survival. A radical step toward “clearing up” the monument from the center of the capital was taken in 1993, when in a special session on 26 February, the Sofia municipality made a decision to dismantle the monument. Supported by the Union of Democratic Forces, the Radical Democratic Party, the union “Anti-Communism and Democracy,” and by several other political groups, the decision inspired intensive debate and provoked various projects for utilizing the memorial site. The municipal government proposed that the monument be taken away to a special place, where a park of horror and amusement for children would be created, or that it be turned into an Orthodox church.^[48] Other proposals sought to replace it with a monument dedicated to the Christianization of Bulgaria, or to the national hero Vassil Levski, or with a statue of the medieval Bulgarian ruler Khan Krum, or by an Arc de Triomphe.^[49]
All of these various attempts to reshape, replace, or destroy the monument were vehemently opposed by the Bulgarian Socialist Party and its parliamentary group, which organized protest meetings and issued a series of declarations denouncing the behavior of the “new builders of Bulgaria.”^[50] Receiving support from other social, political, and cultural organizations as well, these protest declarations stated that the monument’s destruction would deprive the country of “national memory” and that the appeals to destroy the monument aimed to “rehabilitate fascism and to wash over the antifascist struggle.”^[51] According to the Bulgarian Antifascist Union, in a declaration of 24 April 1993, the plans to dismantle the monument were “barbarous provocations against the Bulgarian people’s feelings of gratitude toward the Soviet soldiers who defeated the Hitlerist forces in the Balkans and liberated Bulgaria from fascism.” The monument was affirmed as a symbol not simply of the Soviet Army, but of its wartime cooperation with the Bulgarian Army in the Second World War. Thus, any attack on it was considered “a crude violation of the treaty of friendship and cooperation between Bulgaria and Russia.”^[52] As an alternative to destruction, suggestions were made to raise in its vicinity a monument to the victims of the communist regime, or to complement the monument with statues and inscriptions glorifying all the countries in the anti-fascist coalition during the Second World War.^[53]
One far-reaching implication of these public debates was that the monument became a cornerstone in diplomatic relations between Bulgaria and Russia. After the Sofia municipality announced its decision to dismantle it in 1993, the Supreme Council of Russia sent an open letter of protest to the Bulgarian Parliament. It expressed offense with the municipal decision and hope that the fate of the monument would be decided in accordance with the Bulgarian-Russian treaty of friendly relations and cooperation.^[54] Parallel to this, the Russian Ambassador to Bulgaria sent an ultimatum to the Sofia mayor, insisting on cleaning up the monument for the 9th of May celebrations.^[55] Due to the diplomatic pressure and popular protests, on 12 April 1993 the Minister of the Interior canceled the dismantlement. Since 1993 the monument has been repeatedly brought to public attention, painted and wrapped in construction work, surrounded by live chains to prevent possible attacks, and cleaned on special days. In the debates, the radical position of “simply destroying those sites” was countered by the position that “historical memory need not be broken,” as long as these monuments reminded Bulgarians of both the establishment of communist rule and the defeat of fascism. After 1998, economic crises and the dramatic overturns in government and political power redirected public attention to issues principally unrelated to memorial representation. The memorial site remained unthreatened – the overt assaults abated with time, and the new function of the site as a slate for graffiti inscriptions and a major skating ground helped enliven it with vitality.
Another monument that witnessed rigorous debates after 1989 was the one in Plovdiv. Demands that it be destroyed or reshaped started almost immediately after the changes, when opposition groups undertook vehement acts defacing the monument. In 1991, the pedestal of the Alyosha monument was found covered in blue paint – a sign of opposition to the red symbolism of the socialist period. The relief under the statue, which depicted Soviet soldiers in attack, was covered with the inscription “Enslavers,” while the sign “Glory to the undefeatable Soviet army” was smeared in paint, and another label “Liberate us from the Liberators” was added.^[56] In 1992, a declaration was issued stating that the people of Plovdiv did not want a monument to their “enslaver” and insisted on its urgent dismantling.^[57] With no official decision in favor or against the monument, projects and proposals for utilizing the memorial site proliferated.^[58] In 1996, the mayor of Plovdiv expressed his overt intent to efface the monument from the cityscape. At the news of the plans to destroy the monument, intellectuals from Plovdiv prepared a list of signatures in Alyosha’s defense, and legal steps were taken against the Municipal Council.^[59] A declaration of protest against the decision was prepared, stating that destroying the monument would be a shame for historical memory, no matter to which epoch the monument belonged. “History is eternal,” they stated, “and its judges are time and the generations, not the temporary moods of a handful of people.”^[60] Pressed by the resistance of organizations, parliamentary representatives, diplomats, and ordinary citizens, the mayor stepped back and withdrew the plans to ruin the memorial.^[61]
The ideas about the fate of this monument also caused diplomatic scandals and revealed an arising obsession with “imperial policies” among Bulgarian politicians. The Russian Embassy protested the dismantling, stressing that it would break the Convention for Protecting the Architectural Legacy of Europe (ratified by Bulgaria in 1991), which obliges countries to prevent the defacement and destruction of protected memorial sites.^[62] Furthermore, it was revealed that the Alyosha monument could not be dismantled because this would break point 14 of the Contract for Cooperation and Friendship between Bulgaria and Russia, in which the two countries sought to preserve the monuments related to the history and culture of the two countries.^[63] The diplomatic mess continued the following year, when the Russian ambassador sent a reminder to the Plovdiv mayor to clean the monument of anti-Russian slogans on the occasion of Victory Day.^[64] The mayor vehemently refused to clean Alyosha, because for him it was not a monument to Bulgarian-Soviet friendship, but a “symbol of enslavement.” With the officials’ unwillingness to take care of the monument, its sustenance was made (in the following years as well) largely a result of initiatives by political parties and the Russian diplomatic mission.^[65] It was only in 1998 – when the Supreme Court finally “approved” the Alyosha monument’s remaining on the hill and pronounced the projects for its dismantlement illegal – that the political struggles around the monument finally decreased.
The monuments to the Soviet Army in other Bulgarian towns shared similar discussions and threats for destruction. Having been an object of fiery debates and demands for dismantlement, the one in Russe was finally proposed to be “nationalized” as a monument of culture and protected as state property.^[66] The statue of the Soviet soldier and the pedestal were cleaned from denigrating inscriptions and the monument was preserved as a historical object. Entirely different was the fate of the monument in Varna. Already in 1992, the Varna municipality announced a competition to reshape the monument, but no offers came forth.^[67] To the present, all attempts to sustain or repair the monument have faced protests by political parties and difficulties ensuing from its exceptional size and rigid art. The monument of the Soviet army in Pleven was the only one that was swiftly destroyed soon after 1989. After a decision by the temporary government on 1 February 1991, it was scheduled to be dismantled, but due to political pressure from the Socialist Party and the protests of Russian diplomats, the decision was not enacted. Several months later, without special negotiations, members of the political coalition Svoboda toppled it. The pedestal of the monument remained, however, and projects for building a new memorial upon it were soon developed. In 1992 a competition was held for a new monument and the approved project envisioned raising another monument dedicated to the Russian-Turkish War of 1877-78. In 1998, with a donation from the Embassy of the Russian Federation, the completion of the project was made possible and the monument was officially unveiled.^[68] Modeled after the monuments to the Bulgarian national liberation movement, the new monument sought to reaffirm the connection with the memorial signs referring to the Russian-Turkish War, reinscribing the city back to a coherent ensemble honoring the Russian liberating mission.
As is clear from these examples, the issue of how to interpret the monuments to the Soviet Army in Bulgaria was related to the dissolution of the ideas of “brotherly help across the Danube” and “friendly cooperation.” The debates on historical memory, the changed ideological and “memorial” context after 1989, and the public efforts to work out a distance to the socialist period challenged the consistency of socialist-era narratives. The fate of the “brotherly help” narrative itself appeared dependent on the fact that these monuments represented both the memory of the Second World War and Soviet domination, both the defeat of fascism and the socialist regime that appropriated it for its own legitimization. The attempts to reach a consensus on the Soviet era monuments, and on interpreting them as having two separate lines of commemoration (the war against fascism and the memory about communism),^[69] were frequently seen as steps to re-legitimize the legacy of the socialist epoch and to assure its preservation.
Ironically, however, although public consensus on these monuments was not reached, most of them nevertheless remained standing and came to be accepted as the status quo. With time, the sites that had previously visualized the victory over fascism and had attracted waves of pilgrims turned into objects with few commemorative functions. Although they were revived by the presence of people on special days, the memorial sites were no longer enlivened by school groups, tourist crowds, and organized visits during most of the year.
The new view on the Soviet Army’s role in modern Bulgarian history was reflected back upon the Russian-Turkish War. Novel interpretations of how the war had served the geopolitical interests and imperial ambitions of the Russian Empire – and thus how it had very little to do with “brotherly help from across the Danube” – were voiced. In this interpretation, the war came to be seen as a prototype of the expansionist policies that the USSR pursued once Bulgaria was placed within its sphere of influence in 1944. The voices of this alternative reading challenged widespread attitudes about Russia’s liberating mission. Although the gratitude to the Russian liberators remained unchanged at both the official and popular levels, the idea that this gratitude was exploited for ideological purposes was hard to restrain. Nevertheless, the consensus that the Russo-Turkish War liberated the country remained, and the reminders about the imperial nature of the Russian-Turkish War were rather of marginal importance. Apart from several acts of vandalism in the early 1990s (mostly for the purpose of stealing their bronze decorations),^[70] monuments to the Russo-Turkish War were spared the physical treatment that had occurred to those built after 1945. While the iconoclastic acts at the monuments commemorating the Soviet Army divided local, regional, and national communities, the several acts of assault on the monuments to the Russian-Turkish War were widely condemned by groups from all across the political spectrum.
Regardless of how the Russian-Turkish War came to be viewed (as an element of national history, or as a prototype of the Soviet domination), the very discussion of the war’s meaning reflected the reconsideration of the historical continuities embodied by Soviet Army monuments. Dissociated from the Russian Army’s liberation of the Bulgarian lands, and from the aura of legitimacy conferred by the establishment of socialism, the monuments to the Soviet Army influenced the existing historical frameworks and became an important factor in reshaping the past. As part of a wave that displaced the symbols of the previous regime, the exasperate insistence on clearing post-socialist cityscapes of Soviet Army monuments provided an opportunity to assert political messages that opposed the former ideology. However, this was not possible to carry out without substantially reshaping the notion of the “twofold liberation,” that is, without separating the Russian and the Soviet Army’s entering into Bulgaria and without interpreting these two events independently. This was not only hard to achieve, but often had unexpected results. “Uncoupling” the previous joint between the Russian and the Soviet missions to Bulgaria triggered out tendencies either of interpreting both of them in negative terms or of weakening the symbolic power of the former at the disclaimed legitimacy of the latter. The notions of brotherhood and friendship – although still significant – were largely undermined in the face of the newly raised claims of political subordination and were frequently considered as annoying reminders of socialist discourse. No doubt, this was due also to the fact that an adequate elaboration of the socialist past has not yet been developed by Bulgarian historiography, and to the lack of coherent historical approaches that would replace earlier narratives. What is certain, however, is that the unmaking of socialist narratives will continue to revive public attention and will keep monuments involved into the problematic encounter between the past and the present.